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When multiple developers from the same team are working on a project, regardless of the complexity of the project, handling and managing changes between Git branches becomes very difficult.

Sometimes, we need to merge some specific commits into another branch instead of merging the entire branch, and for this, we use a fundamental tool in Git known as cherry picking.

Cherry picking is a great tool when it comes to selecting just one commit from the entire list of commits in a repository branch.

git cherry-pickCommands in Git

git cherry-pickis an influential command that allows moving random Git commits from a branch in the repository and adding them to the repository you are currently working on HEAD. This command also helps in undoing changes related to past developments of your team.

For example, if we accidentally made a commit to the wrong branch, we will move to the correct branch and cherry-pick the commit into the correct location in the new branch in the repository.

When using git mergeor git rebase, all commits from one branch are mixed. While cherry-pickthe command enables us to select selected commits to assimilate.

Cherry-Pick Merge Commits in Git

Cherry-picking a merge commit is not as easy as it seems. When we perform the merge process, we work with two branches of the same repository at the same time.

For example, use the Git command to parent-Bmerge branch into parent-Abranch.

So, when we want to cherry-pick a specific commit, i.e., merge with two parent branches, we need to -mtell the -p option to cherry-pickthe -p command which commit it should use diffagainst. We will use -p in the following command commit hashto mention the specific parent branch.

The syntax for the above case is explained below.

git cherry-pick -m <commit hash>

Let us explain this situation with the following example of the above command.

M - N - O - P - Q (branch A)
     \     /
      R - S - T (branch B)

As shown above, Pit is a merge commit. If we run git cherry-pickthe command, Git will pass a warning about it.

So now we have to mention the parent branch number with the commit id. It will be executed in the following command.

git cherry-pick -m 1 P

This command will get all commits cherry-pickfrom the above example .O- P

We can also use the following command to perform the above operations.

git cherry-pick -m 2 P

This will R- S- Pselect all commits from in the above example.

It destroys all the changes we made in the parent and that we didn't define in that commit -m.